How different Yom HaShoah will be this year, as we continue to hope for the release of our people held hostage in Gaza and pray for the safety of our soldiers and (some of us) for an end to the war in a way that brings safety and security to everyone, both Israeli and Palestinian. I would have thought, when I wrote this, that it would be the most upsetting Yom HaShoah of my lifetime. And, of course, I would have been wrong.
Today, Dominik and our Aunt Elisabeth joined me to mark Yom HaShoah at Mauthausen. I’m still processing a lot of the day. Right now my overwhelming feeling is one of exhaustion of the sort one feels after a great exertion, so please forgive me if this is a little brief, a little less processed than I would like. But as it’s still Yom HaShoah where many of you are, I wanted to share at least some of the experience with you on the day.
To prepare for the trip, I reached out to all of you here, but also to my cousin Seth via email and Rabbi Bob, who generously chatted with me for quite a while over Zoom. To everyone, I mentioned wanting to be both visibly and vibrantly alive while there; and both Seth and Rabbi Bob reminded me that, for Jews, being a mourner is not a degraded position but an exulted one. And Rabbi Bob also looked a little horrified by my idea of eating chocolate on the site and I don’t like to be horrifying. So instead, I put a couple rocks in my pocket and practiced reciting the prayers Rabbi Bob sent to me for the occasion, because I knew I’d be teary-eyed trying to read them in the moment.
I read the prayers at the large sculpture representing the Jews who died at Mauthausen in the memorial garden that lines the approach to the camp itself and placed my first rock there. Beside it was a stop on the self-guided audio tour that described the horrors which took place on the camp’s infamous Stairs of Death. I placed another rock on a small pile there, and before we were even in the camp itself, my pockets were empty.
And so what I did for most of our visit to Mauthausen was harvest stones from the side of the walkways, filling and emptying my pockets as we passed memorials for both the martyrs and the heroes. And there were heroes memorialized there, Jews and non-Jews alike. I was grateful to have been told, again by Rabbi Bob, that the full name of the day is Yom HaShoah Vehagevurah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day. So I prayed and left stones on the anonymous markers at the mass graves, but also on the memorials to the antifascists, the resistors, the political enemies of National Socialism, and the small heroes of seldom successful uprisings in the camp.
As the prayer reminds us: May their memory endure, and inspire deeds of charity and goodness in our lives. May their souls thus be bound up in the bond of life. May they rest in peace. And let us say: Amen.